College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Literary heritage

Despite little, if any cooperation, Dawn Stinchcomb persisted and wound up publishing a book.
Most people would have given up when faced with the response that Dawn Stinchcomb got when she started her research in the Dominican Republic.

Quitting was never on Stinchcomb's agenda.

"I'm not a quitter," the assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures said. “"Anger is one of my best emotions. When I get angry I do my best work.

"They kept telling me that I couldn't do it," she continued. "I had to go back and finish the study for no other reason than I believe that Blas Jimenez is a great writer and that it was important to pull his and the voices of the others like his within the margins."

Jimenez is a Dominican Republic poet whose writings proudly affirm his black identity.

At least ninety percent of the population of the Dominican Republic is of African descent. But Stinchcomb found out that most of the general population and even the government denies that heritage.

During graduate school Stinchcomb was viewing a documentary on racism in Latin America. A portion of the documentary featured Jimenez and his experiences renewing his passport after returning from the United States.

"He tells the story of how he had to check his race on the passport application," Stinchcomb said. "He checked black but, even though he was obviously of African descent, the person at the passport office told him he couldn't be black and to go back and fill out the form correctly.

"I had never heard anything about this in Latin America - blacks who had to bury their blackness. This has contributed to a form of identity crisis in Dominican culture."

Stinchcomb's subsequent research indicated that the Dominican Republic's denial of its heritage dates back to the 1800s. The Dominican Republic is situated on an island with Haiti. The eastern portion of the island was colonized by the French, while the Spanish established a colony on what became the Dominican Republic.

In the 1800s, Haitian slaves overthrew the French landowners, killing most of them. Not wanting to meet the same fate, the Spanish white elite began a campaign of misinformation using literature as the mode of transmission.

"The white minority successfully convinced many blacks and others of African descent on the Dominican Republic side of the island that they didn't have anything in common with the blacks in Haiti," Stinchcomb said. "They compared the Haitians to barbarians and mass murderers with a strange religion.

"They created a myth that every person in the Dominican Republic had Spanish forefathers and an Indian mother. Most Dominicans still claim that their ethnic heritage is limited to the original Taino Indians and the Spanish to this day."

Stinchcomb has focused her research in her book on Dominican authors who embrace their African heritage. The University Press of Florida published her book, The Development of Literary Blackness in the Dominican Republic, earlier this year. Stinchcomb identifies and examines the role that race has played in the literature of the Dominican Republic.

But the path to the book wasn't an easy one for Stinchcomb. On her first trip to the country she was met with less than enthusiastic support for her work.

"That was a very depressing experience," she remembered. "I was looking for Afro-Dominican writers and everyone told me there was no such thing."

People would cancel interviews with her. She even had one person walk out during an interview.

When they thought that Stinchcomb was interested in canonical Dominican literature they were eager to discuss their work with her. But mention the work of Blas Jimenez and the discussions would stop. Blackness and Dominicanness are two very different things. Blackness opposes Dominican national identity.

"I would attend literary circles and I would bring up Blas' poetry and I was immediately silenced," she said.

A year later Stinchcomb returned to the island better prepared professionally and emotionally. She went to La Trinitaria, the country's capital's most important bookstore and literally spent days on the floor going through book after book by Dominican writers.

She also met with Jimenez and other Dominican authors proud of their African roots. These Afro-Dominican authors were writing their Afrocentric poetry before Blas Jimenez, but had been ignored because their national origins were not necessarily Dominican.

Stinchcomb's investigations revealed that despite the national rhetoric that denied the existence of blackness with Dominicanness, black writing did exist in the Dominican Republic.

The result was the concept of literary blackness and a book that Jimenez and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) would like to see published in Spanish and distributed in the Dominican Republic.

"I feel very proud of what I've done," she said. "I hope I have given a voice to people who have been ignored and haven't been recognized for what they have done and have inspired others to do work in the future about other Afro-Dominican authors."